Robin Goodfellow

   This was the best-known name for an individual *fairy in late medieval and Tudor England. He was a mocking shape-changer, with a characteristic guffawing laugh of 'Ho, ho, hoh!'. He could turn into a horse, tempting weary travellers to mount him, and then dumping them in a river; or lead them astray as a Will-o'-the-Wisp; or appear in some terrifying shape. Yet he also took on the helpful *brownie role in homes and farms. Elizabethan and Stuart writers often alluded to his tricks; a blackletter pamphlet which appeared in 1628, entitled Robin Good-Fellow, his Mad Prankes and Merry Jests, asserts that he was the son of *Oberon by a human girl, was granted his powers by his father, and eventually joined the fairy dance and was carried off to fairyland. It includes the standard brownie motif that when a grateful girl gives him a waistcoat instead of a bowl of creamy milk, he disappears for ever. His name reflects this ambiguity; 'Goodfellow' might be either a tribute to his merry nature and helpfulness, or an evasive term based on fear, since his pranks could be troublesome.

   Some Elizabethans regarded all fairies as demons. Robert Burton included Robin in his list of 'terrestrial devils . . . which as they are most conversant with men, so they do them most harm' (The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), part I, section 2, 'A Digression of Spirits'). The Mad Prankes pamphlet has a curious woodcut showing him (identified by the initials G F) as a phallic, goat-footed, horned figure like Pan or Satan, but carrying a lighted candle and a broom, presumably to show he does housework by night; there are bats and birds overhead, and small figures, fully clad, are dancing round him. The image does not fit anything in the text; the artist may have been adapting an illustration of a witches' sabbath.

   For a collection of literary texts mentioning Robin Goodfellow, see W. Carew Hazlitt, Fairy Tales, Legends and Romances Illustrating Shakespeare (1875); for discussion, Briggs, 1959 and 1976.